Wednesday, September 16, 2009

getaroom.com, the online and offline hotel booking business founded by the founders of hotels.com, has partnered with Travelocity.

getaroom.com currently only covers hotels in major markets, including New York, Orlando, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Anaheim and Miami.

On the international front, getaroom.com also began pitching hotels in London.

But, when you search for a hotel outside of these markets in places like Knoxville, Tenn., or Mystic, Conn., you see this message: "Getaroom doesn't currently service this market. We are taking you to our partner Travelocity for great rates and availability."

Consumers then get redirected to a page that is co-branded as Getaroom and "powered by Travelocity Partner Network," which fills in getaroom's inventory blanks.

In the co-branded program, getaroom would earn a commission on bookings that Travelocity fulfills.

I don't think this getaroom-Travelocity relationship necessarily means that getaroom and Travelocity will be developing any deeper ties. It looks like a stop-gap measure while getaroom.com works to build out its inventory.

For getaroom.com, I guess, partnering with hotels.com and its parent, Expedia, wasn't an option.

4 comments:

Sorry, if I wasn't clear. getaroom.com is privately owned by David Litman and Bob Diener. They also founded hotels.com and sold it to Expedia more than five years ago. So, getaroom.com has no connection to Expedia.

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I've followed online travel, its twists, turns and detours, since the beginning (not Adam and Eve, but Rich and Terry), and will follow the aforesaid in this blog. I'm North America editor of Tnooz and I write USA Today's Digital Traveler column. Things not in my resume: I visited Orbitz headquarters pre-launch in 2000 and, left unattended, eavesdropped and examined the whiteboards to learn partnership details; Travelocity's ex-CEO Michelle Peluso credits me with her success (Wharton notwithstanding) after I wrote a sentence (with accompanying photo) mentioning that some of her Site59 women wore fishnet stockings and then airline execs kept the phone lines busy; I once drove to tiny Sherman, Conn., to see where PhoCusWright lives; and I was a nachtportier in a West Berlin hotel in the days (Btw) when a nasty wall split the city. Fyi, the previous stuff wasn't necessarily in chronological order.

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